Africa News blog

Rape, corruption in camps blight lives of Somali

By Abdi Sheikh

MOGADISHU, Jan 26 (AlertNet) – Nurto Isak’s food rations are feeding her, her three children, and — she suspects — the militiamen guarding the camp in Mogadishu where she and other uprooted Somalis have taken refuge.

The city is host to more than 180,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) who, like Isak, have fled a killer combination of conflict, drought and hunger back home.

Many risk long, difficult journeys to reach the capital, their sights set on the numerous aid agencies that have set up relief operations to hand out food and treat malnutrition there.

Yet many people at various IDP settlements in the war-torn city complain that food aid is not reaching them and accuse local aid workers working for international and Somali NGOs of taking it to line their own pockets.

“Half of the rations intended for our camp is given to the warlord whose militia are said to be guarding us,” Isak told AlertNet (www.trust.org/alertnet), a humanitarian news service run by Thomson Reuters Foundation.

PHOTOBLOG: Children in Kenya and Haiti forced to grow up fast, if they survive

I had a flashback the other day when I was looking at photographs from Haiti of 15-year-old Fabianne Geismar, shot dead in the head after stealing wall hangings from a Port-au-Prince store, crushed in the Jan. 12 earthquake.

The image of Fabianne sprawled on the ground, blood trailing over the paintings she’d grabbed, took me back to my own childhood in Nairobi and the sight of a 7- or 8-year-old-boy – probably the same age as me at the time – who was caught stealing sweets from a street vendor and was beaten and burnt with rubber tyres. They called it mob justice.

To this day, I’ll never understand why that poor boy had to die such a violent and senseless death for something so trivial. I feel the same way about Fabianne – she survived one of the most catastrophic events in living memory, only to be shot in the head for petty theft. And for stealing wall hangings where there are no walls.

Fabianne’s childhood was brutally stolen from her and it got me thinking about how quickly so many young people in places like Africa, Asia and the Americas have to grow up, forced to fend for themselves through child labour or prostitution, denied an education and exposed to violence, disease and hunger at an age when they should be learning and playing.

Of the 2.2 billion children in the world, 1 billion live in poverty and experience violence annually, UNICEF figures show, meaning nearly half the children in the world don’t get to have childhoods. There are also an estimated 132 million orphans in the world, UNICEF says.

Children under 18 make up almost half of Haiti’s 9-million population and the country faces the highest rates of infant and child mortality in the Western hemisphere.

Officials fear thousands of children have been separated from their parents, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation by child traffickers, being illegally adopted by other countries or forced into child labour in order to survive. Around 150 million children worldwide aged 5–14 are engaged in child labour.

Sweet potatoes to beat climate change?

A major obstacle to producing enough food has been the dry weather which hit many African countries last year, including Kenya, where 10 million people urgently needed food when rains failed. Now Kenyan farmers have been asked to grow drought tolerant crops to help prepare for the effects of climate change.

Nancy Opele has been growing sweet potatoes on her farm in Kenya’s western Trans Nzoia district. She started growing the potatoes in 2003 after researchers approached farmers and introduced them to the crop.

“We have discovered that these potatoes just need a small place to grow and they do very well. You harvest a lot of potatoes, Opele told Reuters Africa Journal.

Nancy is part of a group of women in the Bahaso self help group who are planting alternative crops to Kenya’s staple food, maize. Sweet potatoes do well in the region, are hardly attacked by pests and need minimal rainfall to grow. The crop also takes about 5 months to mature, half the time needed by maize.

 Sweet potatoes can be stored in the soil for up to 8 months but once harvested they don’t stay fresh for long. Nancy and her friends usually preserve the potatoes by grating them and drying the flakes out in the sun. The flakes are then ground into flour.

The potatoes are gaining popularity after four failed rain seasons led to a drought last year. Experts say it was the worst seen in the country since 1996. Many farmers lost their maize crop but the sweet potatoes did well.

One way to build food security is to promote use of drought tolerant foods like sweet potatoes. The Kenya Agricultural Research Institute, or KARI, is training farmers to plant improved varieties of the crop.

Why is the West still feeding Ethiopia?

Going organic in Kenya’s biggest slum

A group from east Africa’s biggest slum has proved that you don’t need a big farm in the countryside to produce food crops for sale.

They’re planting organic vegetables on a small allotment in the middle of Nairobi’s Kibera slum that his been cleared out of an old rubbish tip.

A year ago, nothing grew on their patch of land. Today, tomatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins and kale flourish.

Kibera is home to nearly one million people, who mostly live in corrugated iron shacks with no running water.

Victor Matioli grew up a tough inner-city kid. He never imagined that one day he’d be a farmer with a passion for plants and for the soil they grow in.

(more…)

Kenya: Dealing with the hard times

Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki’s New Year address had a sobering message; east Africa’s biggest economy should brace for a tough year because of the global financial crisis.

It was not the most encouraging message after a year that had few silver linings for the country of 36 million, still recovering from a bout of post-election violence early last year.

But the global crisis has strained even some of the world’s most advanced economies as well as many across Africa and Kibaki was not about to shield Kenyans from reality. He even cancelled the traditional New Year’s Eve state ball that is held in his official residence in Mombasa, on the steamy Indian Ocean coast.

Government minsters and officials, used to ushering in the New Year with a waltz with their spouses at the party, had to quickly make new plans for the occasion.

Indeed, redrawing plans, revising growth numbers and tightening belts is a routine which Kenyan officials are used to by now. Last week, the economic secretary in the ministry of finance told Reuters that growth estimates for 2008 had been lowered to less than 3.5-4 percent, down from an earlier forecast of 4.5-6 percent.

In the same week, the government stated its intention to declare a national emergency over a drought that has left about 10 million facing starvation.

In the trendy parts of Nairobi, all seems to be fine.

Selling Africa by the pound

The announcement by a U.S. investor that he has a deal to lease a swathe of South Sudan for farmland has again focused attention on foreigners trying to snap up African agricultural land.

A few months ago, South Korea’s Daweoo Logistics said it had secured rights to plant corn and palm oil in an even bigger patch of Madagascar – although local authorities said the deal was not done yet. Investors from Asia and the Gulf are looking elsewhere in Africa too.

Investor interest in farmland – not only in Africa – grew sharply after food prices shot to record highs last year. Although commodity prices have fallen since, there is still anticipation of long term demand growth once the world emerges from its current economic troubles.

Philippe Heilberg, chairman and CEO of New York-based investment firm Jarch Capital, told Reuters he saw ripe opportunity for decades in south Sudan’s Mayom county. The deal covers land nearly twice the size of the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius.

Land is being leased from General Paulino Matip Nhial, Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) – the armed wing of the ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) in semi-autonomous South Sudan. Jarch Management is also buying an interest in a local company from Matip’s son.

But should Africa be handing out its land to foreign investors and will the local people and countries involved be the ones to benefit?

This commentary in the Financial Times made comparisons with the colonial grab for Africa’s resources and points out the damaging legacy that remains.

Losing billions in Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe may lose its status as the country with the world’s highest proportion of billionaires after the central bank’s decision to lop 10 zeroes from its dollar.

What it means for the currency is that 10,000,000,000 dollars will become just one - although it will still take 25 of the new dollars to buy a loaf of bread.

What it means for Zimbabweans could be much less.

Having so many zeroes on the notes certainly doesn’t make shopping any easier, but there is little in the shops anyway and what is there costs too much for many to afford.

The decline of the currency’s value has become a stark symbol of the economic collapse of a country that was once prosperous by regional standards, but now suffers shortages of food and fuel and has lost millions of its people as refugees to neighbouring states.

Experts doubt whether the impact of the re-denomination will be any more than cosmetic. Zimbabwe removed three zeroes from the dollar in 2006, but prices actually spiked after that.

Is there any hope of economic recovery without a deal to end the political crisis? And can there be a hope of that given the differences between Zimbabwe’s rivals? Is the optimism of South African President Thabo Mbeki realistic with the clock ticking down to the initial deadline for an agreement?

Birds and biofuels at odds in Kenya

The road to Kenya’s Tana River Delta from the Indian Ocean resort of Malindi is a lonely stretch of tarmac punctuated only by road blocks manned by armed police.

Few people from the outside world come this way.

Most foreign and local holidaymakers heading for the popular Lamu Islands prefer to fly rather than use the road.

On either side, grasslands stretch to the horizon. People here live as they have for decades, making a living from grazing animals and fishing.

But a proposed sugar and biofuels project would see 20,000 hectares of the pristine wetland planted with cane.

The plan has sparked anger among some locals and conservationists, who say it is a threat to their way of life and a precious eco-system.

I was given a tour of the area by government officials and the project backers.

Does Africa need aid?

Rich countries look set to fall roughly $40 billion short of the amount they had pledged to give to Africa by 2010. So says a report released on Monday by the panel set up to monitor commitments made amid much fanfare at the Group of Eight summit in 2005.

The panel said G8 countries were not keeping their promises at the very moment rising food prices threaten to increase hunger and child mortality. The report also calls for a rethink of trade policies to help African countries and urges rich nations to spend more on renewable energy sources there.

But how important is aid for Africa?

Africa’s economies have been growing at their fastest in decades — the International Monetary Fund estimates African growth at well over 6 percent in 2007 and expects similar this year.

Not so long ago, net private capital flows to Africa were negligible or even negative.

But investment has soared, with China leading a rush to develop sources of raw materials. Globally, investors have been looking at Africa more seriously in the hope of potentially higher returns than in more developed markets that now face uncertainty.